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Peugeot and Audi are set to continue their endurance-racing battle this year and next in the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

Welcome back, world series

September 8, 2010

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The wait has gone on and on, and there have been false dawns along the way. Essentially, though, long-distance sports-car racing once again has a world championship, and it kicks off at the Silverstone circuit in the U.K. this weekend.

The Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (ILMC) isn't an FIA-accredited, official world championship, but that doesn't matter for the moment. In reality, it is very much a world championship, because next season, it will encompass the biggest, most prestigious sports-car races around the globe.

It will be much more than a European-based series with a couple of flyaway events bolted onto the schedule. That's why it deserves the lofty title as much as any of the final iterations of the old world sports-car series did before it withered and died in 1992. And don't forget that the 12 Hours of Sebring was last on a world schedule way back in 1981.

The ILMC begins with a three-race pilot series this fall, starting with the Silverstone 1,000-kilometer Le Mans Series finale on Sept. 12. It then takes in Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta, one of the two blue-ribbon events on the American Le Mans Series calendar, and climaxes with an event at Zhuhai in the emerging market of China, which is the holy grail these days for any championship organizer with global aspirations.

It's next year that the ILMC really gets going. Sebring joins the schedule, as does the 24 Hours of Le Mans as a double-points-paying round. Silverstone, Petit and, most likely, Zhuhai remain on the calendar and are joined by another European race at Spa-Franchorchamps and a Japanese fixture at Fuji, another track with a great sports-car pedigree.

The ILMC is everything the new-for-2010 FIA GT1 World Championship is not. The FIA series is a TV-friendly sprint championship in which factory teams are not welcome--so much so that FIA GT boss Stephane Ratel has labeled himself a "sports-car heretic." The ILMC, by contrast, complements the Le Mans 24 Hours: The races are proper enduros that thrive on manufacturer participation.

Audi and Peugeot will do battle this year, and both are committed to bringing their new 2011 contenders next season. The hope is that the ILMC will draw new manufacturers into the prototype racing ranks. Aston Martin is on the verge of committing to building a new LMP1 car and could well spill the beans on its new project this weekend. And it might or might not be a coincidence that Fuji is owned by Toyota, a marque that is known to have sports-car aspirations post-Formula One.

Should the series deliver on all of this great potential, then it must fall to the FIA to accord the ILMC official world status. Peugeot Sport boss Olivier Quesnel has already suggested the name: "The World Championship of Endurance."